Sea Turtle Stories – Episode 8

Minnie: So in our last episode Renato shed some light on the mystery around male sea turtles, helping us to understand crucial aspects of male sea turtle biology and ecology. However, today we are moving on to another really interesting aspect of Renato’s work, which is his experience of conserving the Caribbean green sea turtles, in collaboration with communities in and around the Tortuguero National Park located in Costa Rica.

So for those of us who may not be aware, Costa Rica and the Caribbean at large is considered a really crucial part of the sea turtle conservation story, since in some aspects it can be considered the birthplace of sea turtle conservation, which was started off by the famous Archie Carr in the 1950s, who is considered as the father of sea turtle biology. So as we near the end of our podcast series, it makes sense to go back to the very beginning and see how far we’ve come.

So once again, welcome Renato, really happy to have you for another round of some really totally amazing conversation.

Renato: Hi Minnie, thank you very much. I’m glad to be here with you again.

Minnie: So Renato, you’ve worked on sea turtles in the Caribbean for more than a decade now. Before we get into the ins and outs of what you’re actually up to day to day, could you maybe tell us a bit about the history of the region and the sort of history of sea turtle conservation at large?

Renato: Yeah, that’s a great story, richly told by Dr. Archie Carr in his books, and I’ll try to relate some of it, like the way I see it after working there for a decade now. Just a little bit about me, I started working with Sustainable Fisheries of Arapaima, which is a giant freshwater fish in the Brazilian Amazon, and this sparked my interest about the use of natural resources by traditional communities.

The Arapaima populations were dwindling, the government moratorium and sanctions did not work to bring populations back, and then at some point from the early 2000s, these fish populations in the Amazon started going back up after a series of management strategies that were adopted. And, you know, the Arapaima story in many ways relates to the green turtle story in the Caribbean.

So after I finished this work with the Arapaima in the Amazon, I went in 2013 to volunteer at the Sea Turtle Conservancy Tortuguero Program, and I was immediately hooked by the work, which was very cool, you just have to go out on the beach and tag turtles and, you know, do everything that has to do with monitoring the sea turtle nesting beach.

And along with it, I was reading Archie Carr books, especially The Windward Road, and So Excellent a Fishe, which I recommend to everybody to read. And it highlights the conservation story of that area. So such as the Arapaima, green turtle, all over the world were crucial for the diet of native peoples. And, you know, we’re talking about since time immemorial.

But in the Americas, at least, that exploitation skyrocketed once Europeans started crossing the pond towards the Americas. And, you know, there’s an interesting part of it, which is some logbooks in the sailors from that time, you know, from Columbus and on, that would relate them passing through some areas in the Caribbean, where the boat would be knocking on turtles’ shells for days in a row, and that wouldn’t let them sleep because the boat was just knocking sea turtles. And then I think Columbus ended up naming that region with the islands close by as Isla Tortuga or the Turtle Islands, which nowadays are the Cayman Islands. This place became famous for the endless supply of turtles and manatees. And every ship then headed for the Americas would stop there, fill up with turtles, which would be kept alive in the ship’s hold, to then be butchered and served to the crew to eat.

This way of managing the turtles would give those boats, those ships autonomy to explore the Americas for like another year or two. So it’s interesting that green turtles in a way fueled the colonisation of the new world.

So the story tells that by the 1800s, the folks that settled in the Cayman Islands that became so good at hunting turtles that they extinguished the population, the population became locally extinct.

And then those guys started going further west in search of the turtles and ended up hitting the Miskito coast of Nicaragua, especially the Miskito Keys, which nowadays we know to be one of the major foraging grounds from green turtles in the Atlantic Basin. Then from Nicaragua, eventually the captains followed the turtles south towards their birthplace, Tortuguero, which was then called the Turtle Bog or the mouth of the Tortuguero River. And, you know, from there onwards the exploitation of green turtles continued.

It’s interesting because Costa Rica would sell the rights to explore turtles along with the rights to explore coconuts in the shores. And, you know, rights would be sold to a company and the company would then hire people to cover each mile of the beach. So the people during the turtle season would move in with their families, settle in little shacks, like right at the shore. Those people are called the veladores.

And the Veladores would, you know, turn all the turtles on their backs when they came out to nest. And then they would be taken to a slaughterhouse in Limon, where they would be processed and, the meat and the eggs and everything else would be given its final destination. And with that, they’re killing almost every turtle that comes ashore in Tortuguero.

And, you know, that’s early 1900s. In the 1950s, Archie Carr, then professor at the University of Florida, goes to Tortuguero, sees what’s happening. By then, another thing had come into place was that turtles were being killed also for the extraction of the fat or the ‘calapeas’, they call it in the Caribbean, Costa Rica. And that would be sold and would get much more money in the international markets than the meat and the eggs.

So, you know, by then, those guys were just opening the turtles, taking the fat out and going to the next turtle and just leaving the carcass to rot. So, you know, Archie Carr found a pretty dire situation for the Caribbean green turtle. And then Dr. Carr started bringing to the attention of the world what he called the plight of the green turtle and telling, you know, for the future generations, these turtles will be extinct if we don’t do anything.

And, based on that, and also in a little green eco-friendly movement that was going on in Costa Rica at the time, Tortuguero National Park was created in 1970 to protect the main part of this nesting beach. It covers 29 kilometres of beach and about 200 square kilometres of tropical rainforest and submarine area as well. But even though that was the case, the turtles were still legally harvested in Costa Rica until the early 2000s.

There was a slaughterhouse in Limon, the capital of the province, that was closed by the early 2000s when they passed a series of laws to protect wildlife and all. So, from then to now, Tortuguero has changed from a place where turtles were killed to a place where turtles are now conserved. So, Tortuguero is a role model for sea turtle watch and conservation nowadays.

Minnie: Wow

Renato: However, there are some places just outside of Tortuguero that are not that protected because they don’t receive some of the same attention that Tortuguero receives. And that’s why myself and a few collaborators founded the organisation Turtle Love to expand the protection of sea turtles south of Tortuguero National Park. But I think I extended myself too much in this subject, it’s just because it’s very dear to me.

Minnie: No, no, it’s fascinating and I really appreciate that, like the detail. That’s something I talk about a lot as well when people ask me about sea turtles in terms of actually how important the sea turtles were in a sense to a lot of very significant aspects of human history. I feel like turtles were basically much better than having a fridge. They didn’t have the way to refrigerate food or anything, but turtles just being so, unfortunately for them, resilient and able to survive without water and survive without food meant that they could probably be down in the hold of a ship for four, five, six months without dying. And so that opened an incredible opportunity for people, unfortunately, to exploit them and use them to keep themselves going. And like you say, potentially responsible for a lot of the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans travelling across the Atlantic.

So it’s really fascinating and I appreciate all of that detail. It was interesting that you said that the Tortuguero National Park was sort of founded in the 1970s, but the harvest was still legal until the 2000s. That’s quite a big gap in there. That must have been quite an interesting situation between those sort of two quite opposing situations.

Minnie: Yeah, it’s interesting because within the National Park, it became forbidden to exploit the resource. However, the National Park doesn’t start until a few kilometres after the main village.
So I think there was a lot of negotiation going on between the National Park recently established and the local community. First, they had some informal types of quarters of turtles that they could take per family, per year. There was a long process of negotiation. And then eventually in the early 2000s, these laws to protect wildlife come into place and then it becomes illegal.

Although just north of there, those turtles, whenever they migrate back to their foraging grounds in Nicaragua, Nicaragua still holds a legal harvest of turtles where it’s, you know, local people are allowed to harvest them at the foraging grounds and they do so in the six to 10,000 individuals a year. So pretty significant still.

Minnie: That’s more than I was expecting. Is that purely for local consumption still or is there actually any kind of, maybe not export as that’s not allowed as per international laws, but is there any kind of distribution across the country or is it actually being maintained in that place with the people who are harvesting them?

Renato: Yeah, so it’s a very interesting conservation context there in Nicaragua where turtle meat is consumed mainly by local people. And the fact there is that they are autonomous regions. I was in the north and this, you know, six to 10,000 turtles that I mentioned are turtles also based on Dr. Cynthia Lagueux’s data. She’s been working there for the past 30 years. This number is actually observed individuals. So counted, you know, by a human observer. So not even estimates. I think the most that they found in a year was 12,000. But you can only imagine that they also hunt those turtles and end up eating them right away.

So they don’t bring them to shore and they’re not counted. There’s several ways in which, you know, that we could have missed counting turtles. So there are probably many more turtles killed in those years than was actually counted.

And coming back to your initial question, whether it’s consumed locally, it is consumed locally. And turtle meat there, when I was there in 2020, was selling for 40 cordobas or about a dollar a pound. So that’s cheaper than chicken, for example, in the same region. This is why I think there’s such a large scale fishery, because it’s an important part of people’s diet there.

Minnie: Yeah. And is this mainly nesting females that they’re taking who are coming ashore? Or is this also in water? So is there also males as well or is it predominantly nesting females?

Renato: In Nicaragua, it’s the foraging ground. So they’re catching both males and females in water. It’s what they call the sleeping rocks. The idea is that the turtles spend the day foraging in the seagrass meadows there in the region. And then they return to sleep under rocks and outcrops and reefs there in the region. Those guys, they go and set the nets during the night. Whenever the turtles come up to breathe, they get tangled in the nets. And also, their local vessels are filled with turtles until they come back to shore, sell them to the turtle butchers who would sell it in an open-air market just on the street.

Minnie: Interesting. So I guess it kind of highlights one of the things we’ve mentioned in previous episodes about the difficulty in conserving a species that has such a wide range, as even if you conserve it in one part of the world and there are laws and protections in place, and like you say, not even very far away, just down the coast, there’s protections. But then unfortunately, that may be sort of potentially undone a little bit by there being no sort of protections or no regulations in other parts. And so it’s very hard to kind of keep those individuals safe because they’re moving between these areas where there are differing laws and differing feelings and cultural significance around them. So it’s quite a challenge, but it’s really interesting.

It gives you a lot of perspective, I suppose, on all the different kind of stakeholders involved in these kind of big decisions that we have to make about how to conserve a population.

I suppose I’m going to shift back a little bit for a second to the Caribbean. So you mentioned in your explanation there that in the Caribbean as a whole, green sea turtles went extinct.
I’ve heard before that they use the term functionally extinct, which meant that they were unable to perform their ecological role, but there were still individuals present. Is that accurate? Is that what happened or were they actually gone?

Renato: Yeah, I think so. So when I mentioned the extinction, I think it was locally around the Cayman Islands and that’s the main driving force for the captains to then push west and start hunting those foraging grounds.

So yeah, that’s what I understand. It’s probably, they are still recruiting and performing their functions in Tortuguero and Nicaragua, although that region there became, there was no more nesting turtles in the Cayman Islands, which has currently changed. They’re coming back to nest in the Cayman Islands and overall in the Caribbean.

Since the creation of Tortuguero National Park, those populations have recovered somewhat, right? But they’re still supposed to represent about less than 5% of the original pre-Columbian population of green turtles. But Tortuguero, for example, has seen an increase nesting numbers between the 70s onwards.

Minnie: So there has been a recovery of the numbers specifically in Tortuguero. And I guess that was obviously when it was established, the threats were of such significance at that point. It’s nice to see that that actually did work. So is that the current situation? Are the green sea turtle populations stable in Tortuguero at the moment?

Renato: Yeah, I think that’s important. This recovery since the creation of Tortuguero National Park, it’s very important to highlight how important it is to protect nesting beaches, right? Because even though you’re having thousands of turtles being harvested at the foraging grounds, the fact that you’re protecting the nesting beach, you still see a rebound in the population, even though the harvest is happening.

So the population in Tortuguero nowadays has been seen to enter in a decline again. That was as late as 2023, in a paper by the folks of the Sea Turtle Conservancy that saw that again, population, at least the nesting numbers in Tortuguero have been decreasing.

Minnie: Okay. So actually, we haven’t seemingly maintained that. I guess before that, there was obviously an increase that has peaked then, and we are starting to see that go down a little bit.
What are the threats then, the biggest threats that you would say to this green turtle population? Is there a sort of a prevailing theory or explanation as to why we’re seeing a decline?

Renato: You know, there’s many factors involved in there. But there is one that must be considered, which is the global decline in seagrass. So we’ve been seeing that globally, the main food for green turtles have been decreasing a lot due to a lot of anthropogenic impacts, such as use of pesticides to seagrass meadows. And then with the turtle population rebounding to some somewhat high levels, but the seagrass declines are meeting a critical point, you know, turtles are coming back, but their foraging areas are not there anymore.
So I think that’s one aspect that folks here at the Archie Carr Center have been trying to address, because, you know, this has been seen as a potential impact that green turtles are having on seagrass meadows. And there has been some calls for culling green turtles back in places where it had been prohibited, such as the Bahamas and other Caribbean islands.

But that’s obviously not accounting for the fact that the biomass of green turtles in the Caribbean used to be 98% greater than they are nowadays, and seagrass meadows were probably as happy as could be then. So I think that that’s a critical aspect.

Minnie: I guess that’s really tough, isn’t it? Yes, I’ve heard about the seagrass beds and the culling of turtles because of seagrass overconsumption. Are there sort of any other threats?

Renato: Some other threats that are facing those populations still are direct harvest, right? So we mentioned that turtles have been used for human consumption, and green turtles specifically for their meat and eggs. And, you know, there is local commerce that happens in Tortuguero and surrounding areas of both sea turtle meat and eggs. Obviously, the hunt of the turtles, the fishery in Nicaragua. So there is still the direct take at pretty high levels that’s threatening those turtles.

Minnie: That’s very interesting. There’s obviously been, like you said, a long and quite illustrious history of conservation activity in the area, across, I guess, the Caribbean as a whole and then also specifically Costa Rica. With that conservation movement sort of taking root for so long now, what do you find are the perceptions of the local community with regards to both sea turtle consumption and perhaps conservation as well?

Renato: I think it changed, obviously, the whole culture and the whole industry that it changed from, you know, killing the turtles, extracting its products, selling in the market, to keeping those turtles alive, bringing in tourists to watch them. And, you know, the revenue brought by ecotourism in comparison to direct harvest was not even fair to compare, because Tortuguero National Park, I think there’s over 100,000 people that visit Tortuguero during the year.

So the perception of the community changed. So now live turtles are more valuable to local communities than dead turtles. But as I said, in the surrounding areas of the park, you don’t have the same reach that you have in Tortuguero.

So there is not the same amount of tourists, not the same amount of revenue being generated by sea turtle tourism. And that’s where the gaps in conservation are nowadays because turtles are still being killed in surrounding areas of the national park to some limited extent inside the national park as well. But overall, the culture changed, the whole perception of the community changed in terms of what’s more valuable, a dead or alive turtle.

Minnie: And that’s where perhaps the work that you’re currently doing in the organisation you helped to form called Turtle Love kind of comes in then to sort of fill in those gaps. So you work in Playa Tres, I think, which is that right? Outside Tortuguero National Park. Could you tell us a bit about what your sort of organisation Turtle Love is doing in these regions?

Rento: Yeah, of course. So back in, when I first arrived in Tortuguero, I started working in the south of the park, a very remote area called Jalova, and that’s one of the most beautiful places you can ever see, right by the river mouth. You know, the productivity of the environment there is just amazing and there’s a lot of attention being focused in there.
But I looked to the south of the river mouth and I said to myself, there must be a lot of turtles there too, right? Because it’s just like a river mouth away from it. So we kind of started walking that beach just to see what turtle numbers were and we found to have over a thousand green turtle nests being laid in that area. And surprisingly, a lot of leatherback turtles.

We found that little stretch of beach called Playa Tres to have about six kilometres of length and hold almost as many leatherback nests as Tortuguero with 29 kilometres of beach would receive. So that was one of our interesting finds, along with, you know, over 90% of all the nests laid on that beach were being illegally harvested.

And then in 2018, when I was doing my master’s at Tortuguero, I obviously met a lot of people, like-minded people, and we decided to found the organisation called Turtle Love. So the story of the name is that I was doing my master’s, as you mentioned, with sex hormones of sea turtles. And, you know, those hormones, endocrinology in general, they have those horrible names.
So my title of my thesis was very difficult. And I said, like, I need to come up with something catchy if I want to get some grants to, you know, to be able to perform my studies. And then Turtle Love came about.

Turtle Love, sex hormones used as a tool for conserving endangered green turtles. That was the project that I got awarded a Nat Geo Early Career Grant. So that was 2018.

We found Turtle Love. Turtle Love’s mission is to conserve sea turtles through community involvement, applied research, and liaison with environmental agencies. And the main idea that we always had is to generate alternative sources of income that allows communities to live decently without having to rely on predatory exploitation of turtles.

So in addition to, you know, doing the monitoring of the nesting beach, counting nests, tagging turtles, etc., we run a community-based ecotourism program that brings in volunteers and student groups and connects them with the local community. So that generates long-term change on the people visiting us, but also generates revenue for the local community.

In addition to this connection between the young people that visit us with the young people from the community, this exchange of cultural perceptions is also enriching for both sides. So that’s basically what we’re doing. We do research. We do environmental education activities as well. More recently, we kind of broadened our horizons to not only involve research with sea turtles. We started monitoring terrestrial fauna with a special focus on wildcats. Jaguars and ocelots are abundant in the research area. So that’s what Turtle Love is currently doing.

Minnie: That’s really cool. And do you feel then, now that you’ve been obviously established for a few years now, what do you feel the response has been from the local community to the kind of work that you’re doing?

Renato: You know, I think there are sections of the community that receive more than others, right? Obviously, unfortunately, the people that illegally harvest the nests and the turtles at Playa Tres are people from the local community, you know, well-known entities to everybody in the community and to us. But even with those people, I think we managed to get a connection in those five years that we’ve been working there.

Because, you know, harvesting turtles was legal in Costa Rica until so recently that if you get anyone in the local population that’s above, you know, 20-some years old, they have used sea turtle products in some shape or form, right? They’ve eaten eggs or turtle meat. And, you know, sometimes they have harvested turtles themselves.

So there is not a dichotomy where like you eat a turtle, you’re a bad person kind of thing. So I think the perception, I guess, it’s been evolving towards conserving sea turtles. But because of the recent history of exploitation, there is still a feeling that sea turtles are a resource, right?
That was necessary for people’s livelihoods until recently.

So on the other section of the community, which is the people involved already with conservation, because by no means we’re pioneers there. There’s another organisation that I like to tag in whatever I do, which is the Association Salvemos las Tortugas de Parismina.
They’re called ASTOP. They’re an organisation that’s completely run by local people from the community of Barro de Parismina. And they have been working to protect turtles there for 20 plus years now. Yeah. So Turtle Love and ASTOP have a close relationship. And from those folks, the opinion about our work was always positive.

Minnie: Yeah. And it’s like you said, it’s really important that there is quite a lot of nuance in the consumption of turtles and that issue has a long history. And in areas where they have been, you know, endemic, then it’s kind of understandable. It’s probably natural that there would be consumption of them because they were a resource that was available to people and an important protein.

Renato: In Nicaragua, that all came to a head for me, right? Because I’ve been working with conservation for my whole career. And I then went to a place where people were killing turtles and, you know, I was a spectator of the whole process.

And, you know, it was very hard for me to see what I was seeing. And some part of me felt that I was going, you know, to get there and not like the people that were doing it. And after, you know, interacting with those people, I just realised they’re very normal people.
They’re like nicest people that you can meet. Very welcoming, that will bring you into their home, very humble. I went there with this thought that I was, you know, somehow not like these people because they were killing turtles. But then I just found out they’re normal human beings, you know, they’re all good people.

Minnie: Exactly. I suppose the kind of crux of it is that we’re a product of our environment. And if we were born there, we would likely be doing the same thing. It’s just a very normal part of the community and it’s not necessarily immoral or anything. It’s just a different way of living, but it can be hard. And nothing is ever black and white, but especially in conservation where there’s so many conflicting interests and conflicting feelings and different ethical standpoints and whatnot.

So you mentioned before regarding jaguars being very prevalent in the region, in Tortuguero, and you’ve just been awarded a grant by the WWF to study, I think, the interaction between turtles and jaguars. Could you talk a little bit more and tell the listeners about what’s going on with that? That’s not the predator I know of with turtles usually. So what’s the interactions that we’re seeing and what are you looking into?

Renato: Yeah, that’s a great opportunity that we had to study these interactions. So I think a bit of the context of this relationship is that you know, jaguars are present in the areas since you know, we know the area. But only by the 1980s, we started recording more jaguars attacking sea turtles on the nesting beach.

Minnie: Right.

Renato: And it’s interesting because if you look at a satellite imagery at Tortuguero National Park in the 1980s versus now, you see that overall the park boundaries have been respected, but all the area and surrounding of the park has lost a lot of forest. So for whoever goes to the Caribbean or Costa Rica, a very predominant feature is that before you get to Tortuguero or to any of those coastal communities, you pass through some huge expanses of usually banana plantation, pineapple, but in general some of the monocultures of big like banana companies and fruit companies.

And so a lot of the forest in the area outside of the National Park has been lost to that and to cattle ranching, which you know, may have pushed more jaguars into the National Park.

And then, you know, in the 80s you start having the first reports of turtles being killed by jaguars, even though it probably happened before. And then you start in the early 2000s, you get a group that starts studying that interaction and they report that, you know, in 2011 or something like that already 100 turtles are being killed by jaguars every year.

And then 10 years after that, we’ve been seeing that 300, 400 turtles have been killed by jaguars every year. And, you know, we think that that concentration of jaguars inside the National Park may have eventually led them to wipe out a lot of the land mammals that they usually prey upon, right? Like wild boar and coatis and raccoons and that kind of thing.

So, you know, the jaguars concentrated there probably wiped out a lot of the mammals that they used to eat or a lot of the prey that lived on the ground. And then obviously during certain times of the year, you have this influx of turtles that come there and nest, you know, by the thousands and are relatively easy prey to be had, right? So jaguars then get specialised in eating sea turtles.

They will attack the turtles by the soft part of the bodies, usually the neck, and then pull out the contents of the turtles to eat as they go with their paws. And also cubs, those smaller jaguars will enter the turtles as well and just eat from there. Get right inside.

But that becomes a very prevalent or very frequent interaction between those two species, right? And jaguars pass on probably the knowledge of how to eat turtles to their offspring and that becomes a characteristic of that population. In Tortuguero we have footage of two adult jaguars that are, as far as we know, not related, eating from the same turtle at the same time.
So, you know, that thing about wild cats, males being very territorial and that kind of thing, I think that abundance of food may have relaxed some of the behavioural traits that we thought we knew for jaguars elsewhere.

And jaguar populations just flourished and they became every generation more specialised in eating turtles to the point of them kind of going hungry whenever the turtles migrate away from the nesting beach, right? And then you have some jaguars that start entering the local communities to predate on pets and that brings them into close proximity with the human population there, right? And generates a potential conflict that in Tortuguero people will have on the CCTV footages of the local grocery store, you have a jaguar entering the village, grabbing a cat or a dog and then passing back towards National Park. So, you know, that generates lots of potential interactions between humans and jaguars, which come to a head a lot in the other boundaries of the National Park where cattle ranchers are, you know, jaguars go after their cattle and end up being shot or being poisoned or being killed in some manner. So, it is of interest for conservation, both of turtles and jaguars to understand that relationship and that’s what WWF and Airbnb actually have been funding us to do.

We did some workshops in the local communities to empower local people on how to use techniques such as camera traps, the analysis of footprints to help us do a citizen science project to collect data on the jaguars. We already got 12 identified individuals, hundreds of video captures of them. Jaguars have unique patterns in the spots or the rosettes in their bodies.
So, you know, we can tell apart this individual from that individual. But mainly, we want to do an abundance estimation and density estimation for the jaguar population and see how it fluctuates throughout the year in relation to the nesting of the turtle. And then also identify which individuals are the ones passing to the village and find strategies to mitigate the potential conflicts that come about between jaguars and humans.

Minnie: So interesting seeing like adaptation in action that there are, you know, these populations of jaguars that have figured out how to successfully eat turtles. So jaguars, you’ve mentioned that they’re taking like a couple of hundred or something like that. Is this presenting itself as quite a significant threat in Tortuguero specifically?

Renato: So, you know, in Tortuguero we have about 100,000 nests per year. So that percentage of the population that the jaguars are actually predating upon is not of special concern. Obviously adds pressure to the population because of taking out, you know, adult females, healthy adult females. But it’s not really something that is triggering our alarms at this point because of the low numbers and also because jaguars themselves are very, very endangered, right? Latest estimates is that you have like what under 15,000 jaguars in the wild. So, yeah, they must eat and they must perpetuate their species as well because situation is not looking too good for them either.

Minnie: So it’s just really interesting to see like all these knock-on effects.Yeah. And like you say, they’re also endangered. There’s lots of different endangered animals that we need to think of in combination with one another.

Well, this has been so great. It’s very interesting to kind of be able to track this history of sea turtles. Thank you so much for kind of giving us that overview of what’s been going on in this region. And we always ask everyone, just before we close up, a little bit about, you know, you’ve been in conservation for a long time now and you’ve a lot of experience.

What would your advice be to anyone looking to get into sea turtle conservation?

Renato: That’s a great question. I think one thing that I didn’t really know getting into it, and I think that’s important, is that, you know, as we’ve been discussing, sea turtle conservation is an issue with several sides from which to be approached, right? So my choice was to approach it as a biologist, as someone that, you know, looks at the turtles and tries to understand what they’re doing.

But, you know, we need people from all sorts of areas of knowledge to make a proper approach, you know, veterinarians, communication people, lawyers, even administration people, like one of the things that we have to deal with, the nonprofits, a lot of accounting and, you know, running the thing like a business. So there is even areas that may seem disconnected. The knowledge that you have by working in those areas can be applied to conservation. If people are already following a certain career, then, you know, don’t be discouraged because you think your profession has nothing to do with conservation because all professions really do have to do with conservation. And if you’re entering, you know, to choose a profession, to choose what to study at university, just know that you can approach it from several different angles. You don’t need to be a biologist. You don’t need to be one specific thing to make a positive impact.

Minnie: Yeah, it’s so true. I tell that to people all the time. I’m like, does it really matter what job you have? I know someone told me once they’re like, well, I’m only, I don’t have any biology knowledge. I just like, I’m really good at social media. And I’m like, well, you know what, biologists are really, really bad at – social media!

And it’s really important, the communication aspect, you know, the outreach aspect. I would definitely second what you said there. There is a place for absolutely everyone in conservation, whatever your skills, and we can all come at it from different angles and that makes it better, really.

So thank you so much for that, Renato. I think that’s really great advice. And I think that will resonate a lot with people who are listening.

Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure to have you for two episodes. We were very lucky to have your time for that. So thank you so much for joining us.

Renato: Thank you very much. Spent some lovely time talking to you guys. And yeah, thank you.

Thank you all to everyone who’s listening. We would love to hear your thoughts. So please do leave us a review and let us know. If you’d like to learn more about sea turtles and the Olive Ridley Project’s work, please visit our website where you can also support it by naming and adopting sea turtles or adopting one of our sea turtle patients. And lastly, you can follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even TikTok and stay up to date with the world of sea turtles.

So we will see you for our next episode. And until then, I hope you have a turtelly awesome time.